Wispr Flow closes a $280 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures at a $2 billion valuation — with Peak XV Partners and Together Fund among new investors — and launches Canto, a speech recognition model that cuts word error rates in noisy environments to between 5% and 10%.
In August 2026, Wispr — the AI voice startup behind the Wispr Flow dictation tool — closed a $280 million Series B funding round at a $2 billion valuation, bringing its total capital raised to $361 million. The round was led by existing investor Menlo Ventures, with participation from existing backers Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC, and MVP Ventures, and new investors including Acrew, Activate, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV Partners, Together Fund, and PLUS Capital, along with a group of athletes, artists, and cultural leaders.
Alongside the fundraise, Wispr launched Canto, its first proprietary speech recognition model. The company says Canto reduces word error rates in difficult conditions from more than 30% to between 5% and 10%, and is capable of recognizing and converting speech to text even in noisy real-world environments like cars, busy streets, and open offices. The newly raised capital will be used for research and development, particularly improving speech recognition accuracy and expanding the deployment of Wispr's technology.
The round comes less than a year after Wispr's previous raise, which valued the company at about $700 million — meaning its valuation has nearly tripled in roughly ten months. Founded in 2021 by Stanford graduates Tanay Kothari and Sahaj Garg, Wispr Flow converts speech into polished text across professional and enterprise workflows. Users have now generated more than 60 billion words through the platform, and the tool is used by employees at almost all Fortune 500 companies and more than 10,000 enterprises.
The round is also a milestone for Peak XV Partners' expansion beyond India: the firm has been increasing its investments in US-based AI and software startups, recently leading a $50 million round in voice AI infrastructure startup Vapi and backing companies including Primer, Exaforce, PostHog, MarqVision, and Hyperbound. With the Series B closed, Wispr's stated focus is turning its consumer-scale dictation franchise into a deeper speech technology play — the announcement ties the capital directly to advancing speech recognition, setting up closer competition with dedicated ASR providers as well as other AI writing tools.
